Linux for Designers

At the last days a lot of interesting news about Blender poped up:
* First: There will be soon a version 2.49 including improvements and new features: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=152631

* Second: The documentation of the new particle system has been completely updated:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Physics/Particles

* Third: The Blender Foundation released some guidlines about the logo and name usage:
http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundation/logo/

In addition to my Lorem Ipsum Helper and my post Sharing color palettes i created another helper that allows you launching the color scheme designer Agave directly from Gimp.

» Download and copy it to

/home/#YourProfileName/.gimp-2.6/plug-ins

Make sure the file is marked as executable. You will find it at "<Image Window> > Colors > Color Scheme Designer...". Any feedback is welcome

InnerWorld, a landscape generator running inside the 3d suite Blender and uses internal noise functions and external height fields, is now available as alpha 0.0.4. New are:
* Multiple meshes can be handled in one scene
* The material of a mesh is preserved during recalculation of the meshes geometry...
* You can add a simple coloring schema to generated meshes...

Besides Phatch the mass file renamer pyRenamer is one of my favorite batch tools. Version 0.6 brings besides many bugfixes a lot of new features:
→ You can save your favorite patterns to reuse them
→ Undo/redo feature
→ Now you can rename more music formats (ogg, real... those supported by hachoir)
→ You can keep file extensions untouched while renaming
→ Now you can rename directories
→ Allow renaming files and moving them to another directory
→ Added some icons to identify file types
→ Added random number pattern {rand}
→ Added refresh option, to reload files and directories
→ Added autopreview option
→ Add option to fix duplicated symbols on filename
→ Add option to ignore next errors while renaming
→ Better explanations on error dialogs
→ New icon
A Deb archive fur Ubuntu is available for download too.

At the Plugin Registry of Gimp an oldy appeared: Gimp2CSS. This is an refreshed Perl script (install libgimp-perl first) that allows to export the layer data and image as HTML and CSS.
That script didn't work perfect and produces HTML/ CSS code that isn't up-to-date. So i started a more feature rich rewrite in Python called CSSdev which will be available soon.

When i started designing a portal website or programming a click dummy one thing is always needed: the content.
For dummy pictures i often used Fotolia. You can easily search for images and download lowres layout pictures. If a client like one of these dummy pictures you can buy them for a low budget then.
For text i found a tiny Lorem ipsum generator which i use as an external tool in gEdit. I wrote the Author that such a tool would be nice as a Gimp plugin too.
Besides that there are lorem ipsum text generators are online available and as a Firefox extension available.